BioRepository

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Paraffin tissue block

Tissue block repository

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The Homer Warner Center for Informatics Research (HWCIR) is helping the Intermountain Healthcare BioRepository team with innovative IT solutions to assist with biospecimen analysis, tracking, annotation, and inventory management.

The BioRespository team, located on the Intermountain LDS Hospital campus in Salt Lake City, Utah, has one of the largest repositories of paraffin tissue blocks in the Western United States. Cancer researchers have been able to use the tissue blocks to study the DNA of patients who were treated at Intermountain over the last 25 years. The BioRepository team also has the ability to safely store and track fresh frozen tissue samples. DNA and RNA extracted from the fresh frozen tissue samples are helping clinicians and researchers analyze genetic profiles of many diseases and the phenotypic outcomes of diseased tissue.

Informaticists and software engineers from the Homer Warner Center have supplied the BioRepository team with tools to assist in consent tracking and clinical study data capture. In conjunction with the National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG) community, the Homer Warner Center has also provided the implementation and training of caBIG’s caTissue Suite, an open-source biorespository software tracking tool used to manage the collection, storage, and supervision of biospecimens.